As a former member of the Archie Club -- it’s true, I was 8 and I even had a pin -- I’ve been vaguely uncomfortable with the direction the comic’s apparently been taking toward anything approaching actual realism. So you can imagine my reaction when I saw this headline: “Archie Comics will kill off Archie this summer.” That seems like a fairly self-defeating thing for a company called Archie Comics to do, but beyond that … Well, it’s a bummer. (Having said that, does Mr. Weatherbee have an alibi?)

Fortunately upon further reading I discovered that Archie will only be killed off in “Life With Archie,” a series that focuses on the Riverdale gang’s “possible futures.” So it’s sort of like that old Marvel comic “What If?” (“What If Captain America Were Elected President?” etc.), where the characters would die left and right but still be right as rain in their original titles. And so it will be for Archie in the approximately 2,000 other Archie comic books on the market today.

Still, even if it’s just an excuse to sell special Archie death issues with 36 different covers (collect ’em all!), do we really need to see a future, even a possible one, where squeaky-clean Archie dies a bloody and violent death? Details haven’t been released, but there’s a strong insinuation that it will be a heroic death by bullet -- although apparently one cover (below) has him drowning in a giant malted while surrounded by little nooses and skulls and modernized versions of Betty and Veronica standing nearby in extremely short skirts. Which reminds me, kids: DON'T DO DRUGS.

"The old Archie was fine for the Mayberry days, but these are different times," said McG, discussing his vision for the film. "In the 21st century, people want an Archie who knows what it's like to kill a man with his bare hands."